Social Responsibility and Self-Expression

Both intellectuals and peasants have played vital roles in the political arena of 20th-century China. The short stories that follow focus on peasant life and were written by leading literary figures from the 1930s to the 1980s. In my introduction to each part, I try to point to the structure of values that guided intellectual thought and actions and to demonstrate the cultural mechanisms that tied writers to subjects in a political order rapidly being transformed by their often unintended efforts.